*Tour-ette on how easy it is to grow your orchids! (part 1)

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Gardening" Tips for the New Year...

Hey folks! It's that time of year when we're surrounded by discarded pots of poinsettias wrapped in woefully cheerful crinkles of colored foil... the formerly lush and beautiful poinsettias either wilted from thirst or rotting from sitting in too much water, but either way, dying and eventually disposed of like props or yesterday's holiday leftovers.

It may seem funny to say, but plants are not only living things, they are also trying their very best, just like any other life here on Earth. They come into the world in nurseries, assuming they will thrive and grow in a natural world, NOT in some dentist office or on a kitchen counter in Akron to struggle and die by mid-January.

If you've bought or been given a beautiful Christmas cactus or a poinsettia, check online for directions. I will say that they are not indestructible. Try always to give it distilled water, NOT tap! Minerals, fluorine, and chlorine are rough on plants! These plants are used to rain water... pure H2O with nothing else in it except traces of nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2 which get dissolved in it as the rain falls through the atmosphere.

Like poinsettias, Christmas cactuses just HAPPEN to "bloom" during this time of year. They're tropical, and it's pure coincidence that they show off during our Holiday season... We've turned them into an amusing accessory to be wrapped in colorful aluminum foil pots and glitter. They actually thrive in their native habitats regardless of "Santa", etc. As a matter of fact, if you see poinsettias in their home territories, you'll find they will have grown into trees, standing proudly over the cute little cottages and bungalows they're planted beside.

Imagine! A beautiful poinsettia in all its red and green glory, not dying in some forlorn corporate cubicle by a scalding radiator where someone forgot to water it week after week... no!… a poinsettia 13' high, covered with hundreds of its very startling "blossoms" waving in a tropical breeze. Your cactus or poinsettia will be a loyal and very dear companion all year long and surprise you every November/December!! You'll turn around in the Fall after Halloween has passed, with Thanksgiving on the way, and there they'll be!!!... colored buds, red, pink or, white peeking through the green, and you'll be filled with that lovely feeling that even as the colder, grayer weather is on its way, so too is the promise of life blossoming right before your eyes, in your own home, and because you nurtured and cherished it with your own hands... and heart. It's true; all living things, all of them… want love… and to live.

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From Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs"... and the not so merry...

I was stunned when I first went to Hawaii many, many years ago and saw poinsettias towering over the adorable bungalows there… as trees!! It broke my heart to realize that all the beautiful poinsettias people on the mainland were giving each other at Christmas (and killing by not watering them or depriving them of sunlight, etc.) were actually trees that had been thoughtlessly kidnapped from their native-homes for nonsense. NONSENSE!

Wrapped in hideous aluminum foil, tossed into corners of over-heated dentists' offices, knocked over by toppling stacks of Highlights and Jack & Jill magazines, and finally thrown leggy and wilted onto frigid January sidewalks to be carted off with bewildered and abandoned Christmas trees... Even as a child, I found the Holiday season filled with an encroaching melancholy in any corner of the festivities, ready to creep out from under a stack of gaily wrapped gifts or a brightly lit and ornamented garland to tug at one's hem and break your heart.

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